Monday 3 March 2008

Short review on the latest german website relaunches

Maybe you remember the large blogosphere among media blogs about the latest website relaunches, such as Holtzbrincks' youngster news site Zoomer.de, News-TV N24.de or the yellow press website Bild.de.

Despite we note that there is much difference between these sites, one attribute is common: the shift to a visual presentation of news.

N24 focuses on video which seems very logic for a news tv channel (but which has been a novum anyway). Bild and Zoomer use appealing flash effects to present their slide shows and video news, or newsmaps to enhance the selection of regional news.

But both Bild and Zoomer not only use visual features. They establish also a 'visual layout': The top news section on the first screen is dominated by large photos, teaser texts are skipped. Scrolling down, we find a more conventional design, nevertheless focused on big images and photo slide shows.

Compared to this visual oriented website design, relauches such as netzeitung or FAZ.net seem rather conventional. We are looking forward to further relaunch projects to find out if there is a news site design concept which is different from the spiegel-sueddeutsche-focus-faz-netzeitung-scheme.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

A picture is NOT worth a thousand words, especially when it comes to design a homepage. In most of the cases visual teasers without words just don't work for a scanning user who wants to get a quick overview. Zoomer's approach just ignores some basic rules of usability. The typical spiegel-faznet-sueddeutsche approach might seem boring, but it works.